The Accidental CIO

10Understanding Your Business

The goal of a business is to create a customer.

—Pete Drucker

Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value.

—Michael Porter

It is not enough to just do your best or work hard; You must know what to work on.

—W. Edwards Deming

To become more strategic and offer real value, IT leaders need to move away from the role of order takers and toward the roles of business leaders and cocreators. To achieve this, you need a deeper understanding of your business domain in addition to your technical domain. In short, you need to know your business inside and out. To help exploit the current business, you need to have a detailed understanding of how the business operates as well as the constraints and waste that is in the system. To help explore new opportunities, you need to have a good handle on the environment—the business context—that your business operates in so you can understand how technology can be leveraged to capitalize on a new opportunity or mitigate the impact of a new challenge brought on by a competitor, a supplier, or a change in the wider context such as a piece of new legislation or a geopolitical event.

As laid out in Chapter 1, “Why We Need to Change The System,” technology is playing an increasingly important role in the shape and success of an organization. As an IT leader, it is imperative to have a fundamental understanding of the ...